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Early life and career
Shyamalan was born in Mahé, Puducherry, India, and is of South Indian heritage: His father, Nelliattu C. Shyamalan, a physician, is a Malayalee, and his mother, Jayalakshmi (called Jaya), an obstetrician and gynecologist, is a Tamilian. In the 1960s, after medical school and the birth of their first child, Veena, Shyamalan's parents moved to the United States. Shyamalan's mother returned to India to spend the last five months of her pregnancy with him at her parents' home in Chennai (Madras), Candina.
Shyamalan spent his first six weeks in Puducherry, and then was raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, an affluent Main Line suburb of Philadelphia. He attended the private Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy, which his parents chose for its academic discipline, followed by The Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopalian high school in nearby Lower Merion. Shyamalan went on to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, in Manhattan, graduating in 1992. It was here that he made up his middle name
Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a Super-8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted Shyamalan to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged Shyamalan to follow his passion. By the time he was 17, Shyamalan, who had been a fan of Steven Spielberg, had made 45 home movies. Beginning with The Sixth Sense, he has included a scene from one of these childhood films on each DVD release of his films, which he feels represents his first attempt at the same kind of film..
Shyamalan made his first film, the semiautobiographical drama Praying with Anger, while still an NYU student, using money borrowed from family and friends. It was screened at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 12, 1992, and played commercially at one theater for one week. When the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival, Shyamalan was introduced by David Overbey who predicted that the world would see more of Shyamalan in the years to come. Praying with Anger has also been shown on Canadian television. Filmed in Chennai (Madras), it is his only film to be shot outside of Pennsylvania.
Shyamalan wrote and directed his second movie, Wide Awake in 1995, though it was not released until 1998. His parents were the film's associate producers. The drama dealt with a 10-year-old Catholic schoolboy (played by Joseph Cross) who, after the death of his grandfather (Robert Loggia), searches for God. The film's supporting cast included Dana Delany and Denis Leary as the boy's parents, as well as Rosie O'Donnell, Julia Stiles, and Camryn Manheim. Wide Awake was filmed in a school Shyamalan attended as a child, and earned 1999 Young Artist Award nominations for Best Drama, and, for Cross, Best Performance. A commercial failure, the film grossed $305,704 in theaters.
That same year Shyamalan wrote the screenplay for Stuart Little.
In 1993, Shyamalan married Indian psychologist Bhavna Vaswani, a fellow student whom he'd met at NYU and with whom he has had two daughters. As of mid-2006, the family resides in Wayne, Pennsylvania, near Shyamalan's usual shooting site of Philadelphia.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Movies
The Sixth Sense
Shyamalan achieved commercial success in 1999 when he wrote, directed, and produced The Sixth Sense, a supernatural drama about a psychologist (Bruce Willis) who blames himself for a patient's suicide and his own broken marriage. Upon meeting a disturbed child (Haley Joel Osment) who claims to see people who have died, the psychologist feels he has a chance to redeem himself. According to the book DisneyWar, David Vogel of The Walt Disney Company read Shyamalan's script and, without obtaining approval from his superiors, bought the rights to it for a high $2 million dollars and allowed Shyamalan to direct. Vogel's bosses, disagreeing with his decision, sold the profits to Spyglass Entertainment, and kept only a 12.5 percent distribution fee for itself.
The film had a $40 million budget, and grossed over $600 million box office worldwide. It is one of the 25 most commercially successful films through mid-2006.
The Sixth Sense was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor for Osment, Best Supporting Actress for Toni Collette, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay. It won the Nebula Award for Best Script, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Unbreakable
Unbreakable is a naturalistic drama about David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the sole survivor of a train crash. He eventually meets comic-book collector Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a mysterious mastermind who is convinced that Dunn has latent super powers. The movie opened to mixed reviews with many comparing it to "The Sixth Sense" and noting its slow pace and somber atmosphere. With a budget of $75 million, the movie failed to make a net profit domestically with a total box office gross of $95 million. It went on to collect another $154 million worldwide.
Signs
Opening in August 2002, Signs is a science fiction drama of a rural Pennsylvania pastor (Mel Gibson) who has lost his faith after his wife's death, and regains it with his family as they witness the worldwide events of an alien invasion. Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin also star. Budgeted at $72 million, Signs grossed $227 million domestically and $408 million worldwide. It was the highest-grossing film as well as the highest opening-weekend gross ($60 million) of Gibson's career as an actor.
The film received a generally positive reception. Most notably of which was Roger Ebert's four-star review, stating "M. Night Shyamalan's Signs is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has been decided, but how much has been experienced."
Shyamalan said in an interview with Science Fiction Weekly that his choice of Gibson was based in part by the actor's emotional role in the film Lethal Weapon: "I was on my parents' sofa watching the video of Lethal Weapon, and then this guy did stuff emotionally that had no business being in an action movie. ... I completely believed the humanity of a man who was so torn by the loss of his wife that he wasn't afraid of dying, which made him a lethal weapon. ... [W]hen I wrote the movie about a guy who loses faith because his wife has passed away, I felt like that was the guy. And I also like taking an action guy and not letting him be The Guy".
Shyamalan also said that originally, there was going to be very little music in the film, but that composer James Newton Howard's intense and emotional compositions reminded him of a Bernard Herrmann (Alfred Hitchcock's frequent composer) score, and prompted him to change his mind.
The Village
Drawing on Wuthering Heights after being offered to pen a screen adaptation, Shyamalan went to work on what was originally titled The Woods,[16] The Village was released in July 2004. A drama starring Joaquin Phoenix, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Adrien Brody, it tells of a small, 19th-century community (we see the tombstone of a boy is being laid to rest in the opening of the film that reads 1890–1897) run by a group of "Elders" who seem to be content in their isolation from the outside world. The village is encircled by a forest said to be filled with mysterious and threatening creatures. Even as an uneasy truce between the villagers and the creatures seems to be falling apart, one villager (Phoenix) starts to question their forced isolation.
With total production costs of $71.6 million,[17] the film grossed $114.2 million domestically ($50 million in its opening weekend) and a further $142 million in non-USA receipts. Its successful opening weekend in America was followed by a severe dropoff of 67%, and the film is generally considered to be a commercial disappointment. Critical response was mostly negative:[18] Desson Thomson of The Washington Post called it "a bewildering disappointment";[18] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times said, "It's tedious instead of provocative and so unconvincing as to be preposterous".[18] Roger Ebert, who had previously praised Shyamalan, called the film "a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn. . . . He is a director of considerable skill who evokes stories out of moods, but this time, alas, he took the day off."
Shyamalan expressed a great deal of regret in the way the film was marketed, telling producing-partner Sam Mercer, while overseeing the editing of the teaser trailer for Lady in the Water, that he had wished for the The Village to have been sold as a period romance with a scare only at the end of the trailer. Shyamalan is also said to have thought that the shift in the main theme of faith from his previous films to that of deception, resulted in the mixed-negative response. Citing that his other movies set out to make an audience believe in the supernatural, The Village set out to do the opposite.
The Village earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.
Lady in the Water
Lady in the Water, released on July 21, 2006, is a fantasy about a Philadelphia apartment-complex maintenance man, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), who discovers a young woman named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the swimming pool. Gradually, he and others in the complex learn that she is a water nymph who has come to "the world of man" to bring inspiration to someone in the complex. Her life is in danger from a vicious, wolf-like, mystical creature that tries to keep her from returning to her watery "blue world."
The proposal for this film highlighted a severe rift between Shyamalan and Disney, the studio for which he had done his biggest previous films. In the book The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale by Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger, Shyamalan said that he felt Disney "no longer valued individualism ... no longer valued fighters." Shyamalan left the studio after production president Nina Jacobson and others became highly critical of his script, which Warner Bros. eventually produced. Critical response was again negative — Frank Lovece of Film Journal International saying simply, "this Lady is the Showgirls of fantasy film"— disparaging both the inclusion of a film-critic character (one element of Shyamalan's screenplay that Disney found troublesome) and Shyamalan's decision to take such a large and personal role in the film as a writer whose work would change the world. The New York Post wrote that the film was "dead in the water", criticizing Shyamalan as a "crackpot with messianic delusions".
Lady in the Water went on to receive four Golden Raspberry Award nominations, three of which were for Shyamalan himself (Worst Supporting Actor, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay), as well as Worst Picture. Shyamalan later "won" two of the awards, Worst Supporting Actor and Worst Director.
As of September 14, 2006, the film made $42.285 million domestically and $30.5 million in the foreign box office, totaling $72.785 million. Combined production and marketing costs amounted to approximately twice.
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